Chettinad

Chettinad is a collection of seventy-six villages in Tamil Nadu where the Nattukotai Chettiar community built, on the profits of a 19th-century trading empire, the most extraordinary assemblage of domestic architecture in South India.

The Chettiar mansions are the physical record of a community that was among the richest in British India. The tiles came from Italy and Malacca and Japan, the timber from Burma and Sarawak, the cast-iron pillars from Birmingham, the chandeliers from Belgium. The houses were built in the villages the Chettiars came from rather than the port cities where they made their money, as a statement of community solidarity that now reads, with the trading empire long gone and most houses standing empty, as both magnificent and heartbreaking.

The Chettinad kitchen is the most complex regional cuisine in Tamil Nadu: a masala of thirty spices including kalpasi and marathi mokku that distinguishes it from every other South Indian spice combination, combined with a tradition of non-vegetarian cooking — quail, crab, rabbit, mutton — rare in this region. The cuisine exists only in family kitchens and the homestays that have opened in recent decades, never having been translated into restaurants, because the tradition does not consider this food appropriate for sale.

Places to Visit in Chettinad

• Chettinad mansions
• Athangudi tile workshops
• Kanadukathan village

Things to Do in Chettinad

• Heritage mansion architecture tour
• Chettinad cuisine cooking demonstration
• Athangudi handmade tile workshop visit